General Question

Find a file in OS X Leopard? Spotlight not finding it...

I’m trying to find a file on my wife’s macbook that I know exists but can’t find it in spotlight. I’m pretty new to OS X so I’m not sure if there’s another utility that I can use to find this file (third party). Windows let’s you search in real time vs. Spotlight’s indexing service.. Is there a real-time search built into Leopard maybe?

I know the file exists because Mozy is backing it up… I just want to find it and delete it because it’s a dmg that I don’t need not to mention it’s 4+GB!

I think I figured it out… There was a second user setup and the file existed within the trash bin of another user… Mozy was set to backup that user as well and obviously spotlight couldn’t find the file when logged in under another profile…

Sorry guys false alarm.. Looking at the Mozy log files tipped me off to the problem.

You might also have tried the “locate” command in the Terminal. Once the locate database is updated, it finds pretty much everything on the system. Do “man locate” in Terminal for more info on triggering a database update and using the command. Do “locate <yourfilename>” without the brackets to locate the file. Do “locate <filename> | grep <partofthepathname>” to help reduce the number of results, if you get too many.